Freewriting #2: Stenography and me

July 28, 2024

Back in August 2022, I came upon the concept of “stenography” for the first time. Basically - and I'm likely butchering the real meaning here - it's the art of writing really quickly using shorthand writing systems. Well, if “shorthand” also includes writing on those specialized keyboards that court recorders use.

(This is what you get when you make me keep writing forwards without looking anything up.)

Anyway, the point is that stenographers reach writing speeds of 240+ words per minute, all while using a really ergonomic, movement-efficient machine so they only make a few movements per second. It is a completely different beast to writing on keyboard, hammering away to reach just a fraction of the WPM.

I was utterly fascinated. I dived into the topic and found out there is hobbyist software and hobbyist keyboards for doing stenography, that there are a variety of “theories” for deciding which key combinations corresponded to which words (my theory of choice was “Lapwing”), sites for practicing the fundamentals, and an active community Discord server.

I forced myself to wait a few days to see if the rush of excitement of “shiny new hobby” would wear off. Then I shelled out about $200 for a Nolltronics stenography keyboard and had it shipped to Norway, under the internal justification of “career expense.” After all, if I learned to write really fast, that's worth a lot more than $200, right?

The first thing that happened when it arrived was I had a lot of fun. I'm the kind of person who enjoys learning languages and learning weird things. Stenography theories are like weird languages, so naturally, I was having a blast.

I’m also the kind of person who has no problem doing practice drills, and a lot of learning stenography is practicing the mechanical movements. I enjoyed doing single key stroke drills, double key stroke drills, both-hand drills, doing them over and over then shaking it up, watching myself slowly speeding up and doing it smoother, as if I was practicing guitar.

It didn't take many days before I was trying to use stenography for everyday tasks, like messaging friends. It was super awkward at first, like I was stumbling my way through saying “where is the bathroom” in a foreign language, except much slower and with more dictionary lookups. But it was so much fun. After a couple of weeks, I was able to write certain common words and sentences really smoothly, and it felt good.

After a couple of weeks, my RSI also came back with a vengeance.

I had to abandon stenography and conserve my tendons. The keyboard is still packed away in its case, on a bookshelf in my home, waiting for me to pick it up again or to find it a better home.

There's a common saying in programming that typing speed is never the bottleneck when you write software. And in this case, I managed to hurt a whole different bottleneck in my quest to type faster.

Still, I do not regret the attempt.